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The connection thus formed grew into the most intense friendship, and never was there wilder and stranger sprite out of fairyland than the extraordinary being whom this shrewd Yorkshireman, as unlike himself as possible, grew to adore and patronize. Shelley had brought his scientific tools with him, and lived surrounded by batteries and crucibles, with holes burnt in his carpet, and diabolical odors breathing through his apartments. He lived chiefly on bread, taking his meals in the streets from the loaf which he bought on his way, and tore to pieces as he walked and talked. He took very long walks with a pair of dueling pistols in his pocket, stopping now and then to refresh himself by firing at some mark he had set up; he lingered hours over ponds by the roadside, throwing stones into them, or floating paper boats, which he made by the score -an enthralling delight, from which it was scarcely possible to withdraw him. When in his rooms, and engaged in the most earnest conversation, he would suddenly stop, stretch himself "upon the rug before a large fire like a cat," and go to sleep there for two hours, with "his little round head exposed to such a fierce heat that I used to wonder how he was able to bear it." While the Poet-Faun took this sudden refreshment, his mortal friend sat and read, sometimes trying to shelter the head of the sleeper from the fire, and no doubt many a time pondering over him with that wondering consciousness of incongruity which every body who knew Shelley seems to have vaguely felt, though it did not affect their love for him, or their interest in his fitful ways. Was there ever a more distinct embodiment of the sylvan half-human nature of pagan fancy, with all its wild freedom squeezed into the mere human mold which could not contain it? And a certain pain and disquiet, such as might well belong to a strange spirit wandered out of its sphere, and straying with "blank misgiving" among "worlds not realized," breathes through the whole story. The Faun of Mr. Hawthorne's weird romance is not half so true or striking as this real impersonation; for this strange being was gentle as well as wild-tender, affectionate, and caressing, as well as lawless and insubordinate; docile, and yet untamable; a confiding child and unbelieving rebel all in one. Amid the ordinary trite records of human proceedings, an

apparition at once so touching and so bizarre comes like some gust of wailing wind through the serenity of the common day. He stirs strange depths of feeling in all across whose path he passes swift and sudden. He opens up a new and weird world, where nothing is known or definite, but all vague, shadowy, wistful. Admiration and pity and wonder surround him; the outside world denounces and vituperates, taking him in its ignorance for a man like others; but the inner circle of spectators, who know him, do not know what to say or think. To them it is impossible to blame; they are baffled, without being aware how it is, by the sweet serenity and purity, in a way, of this creature, who has no conscience or even consciousness of ordinary human moralities. This is evidently the mental position of all who knew him best and loved him most. They form a little circle round the spot in which he plays his pranks; their minds are always full of wonder, mixed with a little affectionate fear, as to what he may do or say next. Indulgently and tenderly they listen to the extraordinary adventures of which, blazing with earnestness and selfbelief, he tells them-and smile at each other, and ask furtively what confirmation there is for these marvels. Generally the conclusion is that no confirmation exists at all, and that the story is a simple fable. But not for any earthly inducements, scarcely for his life, would one of those faithful friends allow that Shelley lied. Not so-for Ariel can not lie. To that sweet sprite his imaginations are as real as facts are to us. We do not know a more remarkable instance of this curious devotion and indulgence, than that which has led Mr. Hogg, himself no genius, but a somewhat cynical man of the world, to give the following explanation of Shelley's romancing:

"He was altogether incapable of rendering an account of any transaction whatsoever according to the strict and precise truth, and the bare, naked realities of actual life; not through an addiction to falsehood, which he cordially detested, but because he was the creature, the unsuspecting and unresisting victim, of his irresistible imagination.

"Had he written to ten different individuals the history of some proceeding in which he was himself a party and an eyewitness, each of his ten reports would have

varied from the rest in essential and important circumstances. The relation given on the morrow would be unlike that of the day, as the latter would contradict the tale of yesterday. Take some examples: He writes:

"I was informed at Oxford that in case I denied the publication, no more would be said. I refused, and was expelled.'

"This is incorrect; no such offer was made, no such information was given; but, musing on the affair as he was wont, he dreamed that this proposal had been declined by him; and thus he had the gratification of believing that he was more of a martyr than he really was. Again he writes thus:

"At the period to which I allude, I was at Eton. No sooner had I formed the principles which I now profess, than I was anxious to disseminate their benefits. This was done without the slightest caution. I was twice expelled, but recalled by the interference of my father.'

"All this is purely imaginary; he never published any thing controversial at Eton; he was never expelled-not twice, not once. His poetic temperament was overcome by the grandeur and awfulness of the occasion, when he took up his pen to address the author of Caleb Williams,' so that the auspicious Apollo, to relieve and support his favorite son, shed over his head a benign vision. He saw himself at his Dame's, with Political Justice,' which he had lately borrowed from Dr. Lind, open before him. He had read a few pages, and had formed his principles in a moment; he was thrown into a rapture by the truisms, mares' nests, and paradoxes which he had met with.

"He sees himself in the printing-loft of J. Pote, bibliopola et typographus,' amongst Eton grammars and Eton schoolbooks, republishing with the rapidity of a dream, and without the slightest caution,' Godwin's heavy and unsalable volumes. He sees himself before the Dons, convened and expelled; and, lastly, he beholds the honorable member for Shoreham, weeping on his knees, like Priam at the feet of Achilles, and imploring the less inexorable Dr. Keate.

"All this, being poetically true, he firmly and loyally believes, and communicates as being true in act, fact, and deed, to his venerable correspondent."

The student life which these two most dissimilar friends shared lasted only for about eighteen months. During this time they were inseparable, their vacations only bringing about a new kind of intercourse in the shape of letters. Shelley seems to have taken a fancy-more like the fancy of a girl than a young man-to bring together his friend and his favorite sister Elizabeth a project which, however, came to nothing. His letters are full of plans to invite Hogg to Field Place; full of coincidences regarding Shelley's own brief and hot boy-love for his cousin Harriet, and full of the excellences and graces of Elizabeth. These letters contain many expressions of melancholy; but it seems very unlikely that these meant more than youth's fantastic plaints over its own unhappiness-deepened in this case by a wildly visionary nature, never at home on earth-generally do. This period, however, was very summarily and painfully brought to an end. Shelley, who had all the tricks of his spiritual prototypes, and was never happier than in setting trains of visionary mischief, had acquired, as early as his Eton days, a habit of writing to people whom he knew only by name, on pretence of asking information, but really to lead his unconscious correspondents into arguments, and confute them with eldritch skill and cleverness. One infuriated chemist, treated in this way, threatened, it is said, to write to his elfish opponent's tutor, and have him whipped; a style of argument which has always been acceptable to the losing side. The same curious system of mischief occupied the young student at Oxford. Instead, however, of the innocent and stupid hoax which gives a pleasure of which he is soon deeply ashamed, to many a youth of eighteen, there was a certain diabolical fun in the pranks of this wild Ariel in cap and gown. His new mode of proceeding was as follows:

"When he came to Oxford, he retained and extended his former practice without quitting the convenient disguise of an assumed name. His object in printing the short abstract of some of the doctrines of Hume was to facilitate his epistolary disquisitions. It was a small pill, but it worked powerfully: the mode of operation was this: He inclosed a copy in a letter, and sent it by the post, stating, with modesty and simplicity, that he had met accident

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ally with that little tract, which appeared unhappily to be quite unanswerable. Unless the fish was too sluggish to take the bait, an answer of refutation was forwarded to an appointed address in London, and then in a vigorous reply he would fall upon the unwary disputant, and break his bones. The strenuous attack sometimes provoked a rejoinder more carefully prepared, and an animated and protracted debate ensued. The party cited, having put in his answer, was fairly in court, and he might get out of it as he could. The chief difficulty seemed to be to induce the party addressed to acknowledge the jurisdiction and to plead; and this, Shelley supposed, would be removed by sending, in the first instance, a printed syllabus instead of written arguments."

This pamphlet was inscribed with the mystic letters Q. E. D., and was sent about the world right and left, raising "rich crops of controversy." It was not intended, Mr. Hogg tells us, for the general reader, but only for the metaphysician; and " as it was shorter, so was it plainer, and perhaps, in order to provoke discussion, a little bolder than Hume's Essays." Its title, perhaps, was still bolder than its scope. It was called "The Necessity of Atheism." Mr. Rossetti, the last and perhaps most entirely enthusiastic of all Shelley's biographers, thinks it for the dignity of his hero to give this proceeding the gravest character, and to accept it as a real and absolute profession of the poet's faith. "We shall do well to understand once for all,” says this champion with curious grandiloquence, "that Percy Shelley had as good a right to form and expound his opinions on theology as the Archbishop of Canterbury had to his." This is a somewhat appalling assertion, especially for those unlucky wights who are charged with the care of heroes of nineteen; but perhaps if the Archbishop of Canterbury took to expounding his theology in the shape of anonymous pamphlets, we might be better able to judge of his rights in the comparison. Mr. Hogg tells us that his young friend argued "through the love of argument, and because he found a noble joy in the fierce shocks of contending minds." But the authorities about him did not sympathize in this noble joy; and on Ladyday, in the year 1811, Shelley being then about eighteen and a half, he was suddenly summoned before the master of

his college. There he was asked abruptly whether he was the author of the pamphlet, a copy of which was shown to him; and on his refusal to reply, was immediately expelled. His friend Hogg, who ventured to remonstrate, had the same summary sentence of banishment pronounced upon him. The next morning, both lads, in such a state of excitement, and with such a sense of wrong, as must have been delightful to them amid all its bitterness, left the University. Hogg intimates, in the calmness of after-reflection, that he thinks they might have been allowed delay had they condescended to ask it; and that the reputation of the college having been saved by such an appearance of sharp action, they might have been tacitly allowed to remain the ordinary time. But the young blood was up, even of the steadier student, and they rushed up to London together, blazing with their consciousness of wrong.

This was the origin of Shelley's quarrels with his family. Perhaps his college was to blame for the precipitate and arbitrary manner in which this violent step was taken; but it is difficult to see how the authorities could have winked at such a production as the "Necessity of Atheism," or the anonymous combats of its compiler. One of Shelley's biographers tells us that Hogg's father never forgave, and went to his grave without ever again seeing, his son; but Mr. Shelley, muchabused man, was not so hard upon the greater culprit. He did see his prodigal, and some vague negotiations arose between them which it is difficult to make out, at least from Shelley's account, though the father is very simple and very precise in his demands, according to a letter in his odd and complicated style, which is given in Mr. Hogg's book, where all he asks is that his son would return home, give up communication with his friend Hogg, and place himself under the care of a tutor selected by his father. These terms, however, were utterly unacceptable to the rebellious spirit to which they were addressed; and while Hogg, more dutiful, returned to his native county to study in York the humble but honorable trade of conveyancing, Shelley remained in London in Poland Street, not an attractive region, in lodgings which he had been attracted to by the paper with which the walls were covered, and which

was printed in imitation of a trellis overgrown with grapes! Here and elsewhere in London he remained, with occasional visits to his home in the country, and the houses of other relatives, till the end of August, when the scenes suddenly shifted, and a new chapter began in his career.

It is not easy to know how the boy-poet lived during this interval. Mr. Rossetti tells us it was on the little savings of his sisters, which they sent to him by means of one of their schoolfellows, Harriet Westbrook, a beautiful girl of sixteen. Whether this was so or not-and the fact that Shelley himself positively informed Hogg in May: "I have come to terms with my father. I call them very good ones. I am to possess £200 per annum," makes it unlikely yet it is certain that Harriet was at school with Shelley's sisters, though of much inferior condition, her father being the keeper of a tavern-and that he became acquainted with her through their means. The philosopher of nineteen had a great many conversations upon profound and interesting subjects with the open-minded and lovely-faced listener of sixteen, who, for her part, was very sick of being at school, and of all the restraints which generally limit the independence of the British subject at that age. No doubt she learned a great deal from Shelley, who informs his friend on one occasion that "Miss Westbrook is reading Voltaire's 'Dictionaire Philosophique,'" perhaps not quite the kind of literature most appropriate in the circumstances. A little later he reproves Hogg gravely for the vulgar nonsense of supposing him to be in love with Harriet; but in his very next letter announces to him, that in consequence of the brutal tyranny of Harriet's father, "who has persecuted her in the most horrible way by endeavoring to compel her to go to school," "she has thrown herself on my protection." This conclusion, equally mad and foolish on the girl's side, is, however, received on the boy's with very highly honorable sentiment. He is staggered for the moment, and reels under the "flattering distinction;" but whereas he had expressed a very unfavorable opinion of marriage a short time before, he now makes up his mind to try and be converted to it. "Marriage, Godwin says, is hateful, detestable," he cries, in the beginning of May; a kind of ineffable sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most des

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potic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies." But in August, as soon as this startling prospect has opened upon him, he writes to his friend, "I will hear your arguments for matrimonialism;" and soon after declares that the plea of "impracticability, and, what is even worse, the disproportionate sacrifice which the female is called upon to make these arguments ... I can not withstand." It seems to us that there is something extremely honorable to the lawless youth in this sudden conversion. So far from rejecting the principle of marriage in order to excuse his own passions, he becomes converted to the bond distasteful to him, as soon as the responsibility of another's happiness is thrown on his astonished shoulders. Had he, with his avowed principles and ruined character, carried off the imprudent girl who threw herself on his protection, without troubling himself about the results, it would have been perfectly natural and in character. But there is a gleam of nobleness in this sudden pause which comes in the midst of his excitement-this thought for the other who trusts herself to him, which is equally fine and unexpected. To our thinking, it is perhaps the finest thing in all Shelley's life.

He had nowhere expressed any love for Harriet before this. He had spoken much of her, it is true, as a young man does of a girl to whom he is being gradually attracted; but, it would seem, was still far from having reached any thing like passion, when the foolish impatient young creature thus took matters into her own hands. Shelley, however, does not appear to have ever thought of resisting. With the same high honor which we have just remarked upon, it is evident that he held himself committed to Harriet as soon as she had thus committed herself to him—a fact which shows that, under all the wildness of his strange nature, the soul of a true and knightly gentleman existed in him. He took her to Edinburgh, and married her there, according to his friend's account; and there, for the first time since their Oxford adventure, Hogg saw again his "incomparable friend." The incomparable friend was nineteen, and his bride sixteen. They had as much knowledge of the world between them as two babies; and they had, or thought they had, two hundred a year, and the displeasure and alien

ation of all their friends. But none of these things troubled the serenity of these dream-creatures. Never was there a picture of more absolute yet pretty foolishness. The three roamed about together, the baby-pair being of another strain from those impassioned lovers who dislike the presence of a third party; and at home in their lodgings Harriet read aloud the most proper and instructive of books, and was ever serene, blooming, smiling, neat, and imperturbable-one would have said the very wife for an excitable and half-crazed poet-a warm, placid, steady prop for him to lean upon. To be sure, Nemesis arrived after a few pleasant weeks, in the shape of a grim schoolmistress-like elder sister, who kept them all in order. But except But except for this uncomfortable alien element, the match would not seem at first to have been an unsuccessful one. Harriet was always ready to pack up and be off at an hour's notice. She was ready to move into Wales or Ireland or Cumberland, whereever novelty and Shelley bade her. She was perfectly good-tempered and insouciante. She gave in to all his disorderly ways, and was indeed as easy about meals and hours as he was, dispensing with the one and forgetting the other; and so far the marriage was not such an absolute failure as, according to all human laws, it ought to have been.

However, as was natural, it raised a new imbroglio, and apparently cut off Shelley from all further personal intercourse with his family. The Shelleys have been wildly vituperated, as indeed have been all who have ventured to lift a hand against the poet-a doom which even the present writer does not hope to escape; but in reality it is very evident that their son had done every thing a son could do to offend and wound them. He had brought a public stigma on his name; he had attempted to fill the mind of at least one of his sisters with his own wildly skeptical ideas; and now he had made the most glaring mésalliance on the very back of his other offences. Parental anger had not got time to cool when it was thus fanned into fiercest blaze again. We are never formally told, however, that Shelley's two hundred a year was withdrawn from him; and it is certain that he managed to live somehow, to make continual changes and long journeys, amusements which are far from being inexpensive, during the three years which ensued.

And what years these were ! Never Pixie of the wilds, never Will-o'-the-wisp, or the mischievous wanderer Puck himself, had a a wilder, more fantastic existence. The strange trio-for Harriet's sister remained with them-went to York for a few weeks, to be near Hogg, then plunged suddenly off into Cumberland, to Keswick, where they made friends with Southey, and where Shelley commenced the correspondence with William Godwin, which was to influence so much his future life. In three months' time the eccentric party were off again from this seclusion, and this time, of all places in the world, it was Dublin they went to; and their object (of all objects in the world) was "to forward as much as we can Catholic Emancipation!" In pursuance of this, when we arrived in Dublin, Shelley published a pamphlet, “An Address to the Irish People," and also proposals for an association of philanthropists to regenerate the nation by intellectual and moral means. The first was cheaply printed, and written in language " willfully vulgarized, in order to reduce the remarks it contains to the taste and comprehension of the Irish peasantry." Shelley himself is said to have distributed this pamphlet from the balcony of the house he lived in to the passers-by. He also appeared and spoke at one meeting, at least, where O'Connell and other notable persons were present. Perhaps that astute demagogue was not sorry to have the name of the son of an English member of Parliament in the list of his supporters at that early period. However, this wild and aimless crusade, undertaken heaven knows why, and ending in nothing, did not last long. They went to Ireland in the end of February, and by the 25th April we find the little family in Wales, from whence they took another flight to Devonshire, returning in autumn to Wales again, but to a different spot. Their new residence was Tanyrallt in Carnarvonshire, and there occurred a mysterious accident, which Shelley either dreamt, invented, or really encountered, no one can tell which. All at once, from out of their solitude, frantic shrieks from the young husband and wife made themselves audible to all their friends. Some wretch in human form had attempted to assassinate Shelley! The ball of the assassin's pistol had penetrated the poet's nightgown, and with headlong terror the little party fled from the house and country, once more

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